Peter Riegert
Peter Riegert is an actor, born 1947.
Riegert has the kind of filmography where the famous credit and the good credit are not the same thing. The famous one is Boon in Animal House, the mildest member of a fraternity comedy that made stars of much louder people. The good one is Mac in Local Hero, the oil company man sent to buy a Scottish village who slowly stops wanting to.
That second performance is the argument for him. The film hands him almost nothing to play: no crisis, no speech, just a change of heart registered across a series of small scenes. Riegert does it with pauses and a kind of amused stillness, and the result is one of the best studio-funded performances of the 1980s that nobody ever brings up. He ran the same technique again in Crossing Delancey as a pickle seller courting a woman who thinks she has outgrown the neighbourhood, where the entire part is patience.
The rest is character work, and a lot of it: Mitch Kellaway in The Mask, the attorney in Traffic, Lou Levov in American Pastoral, Oscar Newman in Show Me a Hero, corporate operators in Barbarians at the Gate and A Shock to the System. He directed as well, and his short film By Courier earned him and its producer an Academy Award nomination for best live action short. Reference works now describe him in the past tense as a former actor, which sits oddly next to credits as recent as Extrapolations.
Movies (22)
- The Mask (1994)
- Animal House (1978)
- Traffic (2000)
- We Bought a Zoo (2011)
- Oscar (1991)
- A Shock to the System (1990)
- American Pastoral (2016)
- Local Hero (1983)
- Passed Away (1992)
- Barbarians at the Gate (1993)
- Gypsy (1994)
- The Infiltrator (1995)
- The Chosen One (2010)
- Hi-Life (1998)
- Surrender, Dorothy (2006)
- Infinity (1996)
- The Object of Beauty (1991)
- Crossing Delancey (1988)
- Face Down (1997)
- Pie in the Sky (1996)
- At Middleton (2013)
- National Lampoon's Movie Madness (1982)
TV (8)
Where to start with Peter Riegert
Local Hero first, and it is not a close call. If you watch one thing on this page make it that, and pay attention to how little he does with his face while the film changes around him.
Crossing Delancey is the natural second, the same quiet technique inside a New York romantic comedy that has aged far better than most of its 1980s peers. Animal House is the reason he got cast in things for a decade, and he is the straight man in it, which is the least fun job in the film. After that, sample the character work: The Mask for the studio version of him, Traffic and Show Me a Hero for the serious version, and American Pastoral for a good performance inside a film that does not come together.